Being an immigrant is weird, or about the Persian word 'qhurbat'.

My grandmother is Brazilian, and she emigrated to Venezuela when she was about my age, in her late twenties. She had married an architect from Puerto Cumarebo and moved with him from Rio de Janeiro to the Amazon jungle, where an oil company had hired him to design the homes of its technical personnel. They lived for a good while in a house made of wood and corrugated roofing sheets, and now she lives in a beautiful house they built and designed, with a large terraced garden she doesn't tend anymore. 

Contrary to what most people assume about their grandmothers, I don't think she really has any lessons to share from the path her life took. This is not due to her being thoughtless, I believe. She doesn't talk a lot about the architect, my grandfather, who died over a decade ago. They made a large circle of frieds back in the eighties and nineties, but emigration and old age left them (and now her alone) mostly friendless. I remember from a group trip from my childhood a friend she had, whose husband died not too long ago, and who now lives as a recluse in the same neighborhood, just a few hundred meters away from her. They haven't met in years. It's as if she has grown bored of life, and is now ready to move beyond, if there is indeed anything beyond it. Sometimes I find myself thinking of her, and speaking of her, in the past tense. I wrote this poem the other day, thinking about her:

When I was a child your hands

would pick and fry green beans

from the garden for me.

Your house was in the sun

and you smelled like wood and mint

and the days were longer than years;

more real than dates, all-encompassing

boundless blue spaces for running across.

Now I am imprisoned in a faraway shore

waiting in a shadow for the moment

you become ill.

Your wrinkled hands still make mango juice

but hardly anybody comes by to drink

and the nights are short and the dates

succeed endlessly like a tapping foot,

rushing to future days in which you'll be

long time gone, grandmother.

What I have found is that there's really no lesson to derive from emigration. Well-meaning people in wealthier countries are content to frame it as the pursuit of a better life, but it really is just fleeing. I guess a few true expatriates do like to leave and settle somewhere else, but the immigrant is simply like Moses, a stranger in a strange land. Not better nor worse, and good and bad in the same proportions as we were in our land of origin, but in either case a stranger.  Except for the brutish among us (who perpetually live as foreign among strangers no matter where they are, since they do not regard the common of humanity as anything but lambs or wolves, to be preyed upon or avoided), we live at least two lives, and at least one of them is like a dream. For those who left our countries when young, our past resembles a dream. For those who left latter, their present is but dreaming, and only their past is real. And we all move on.

Time will always pass too fast

and before you realize it

your dog will be resting in the earth

for many years, from long ago.

Why would you leave your hometown

if you can avoid it?

Outside there's nothing

but dust from the road

accumulating in your joints until

you are much too stiff to walk back home.

My assumption is that for an experience to be a lesson there should also be an alternative not selected, which we discover to likely have been better and vow to take when having a similar choice in the future. This is precisely what we cannot do: there is no other choice after we have emigrated, and to believe there is guarantees staying in an in-between state, thinking that maybe you could, or should, go back. And if not, thinking that you could, or should, leave. And, again, we all move on, and then the entirety of life is like a dream; both past and present like a state of dorveille such that when it's over you would be troubled to say if it happened or not. So most of us, after a few months or years at most, accept that something has fundamentally changed and that this is life now, and forego any other options and their lessons.

Thinking about this, I wrote a poem a few months ago, which I entitled 'Young immigrants':

Picked from the vine to mature after cut,

this we are. Sent immediately out to fate

to either be bought or rot in storage

away from the sun. No rain are we allowed,

no blemishes: each must be perfect

and thoroughly clean, uncomplicated,

arranged in neat rows of equal sight.

Nor are allowed the meandering seasons

and their amicable march and warmth

bringing out the first wrinlkles, no,

we wrinkle when green and we mature.

And some of us rot.

No time or chance for flowers, we

must fruit without bloom; we

age without having been young

and pass youth by in straight logistics

passive like tomatoes.

But we are allowed a complaint

of no relevance.

This essay is a bit that complaint, kind of trying to explain how I perceive the meaning of the Persian word 'ghurbat', which appears often in Persian poetics. I like to think it also is the best adjective for that Johnny Cash song, 'The Good Earth': I've traveled far and traveled wide / I've seen a lot of things / But looking back on all the years / I don't know what they mean / Like steel I'm probably stronger / From going through the fire / I kept on climbin' lower / Diggin' deeper to get higher.
I guess there's not much else to say. My ancestors were immigrants, then my parents weren't, and now I am an immigrant again, and I work as a fishmonger and count the days away. Humanity is mostly a migratory species, when our history is considered in its total extent of a couple hundred thousand years, so perhaps this fate was just a statistical likelihood. 

To immigrate is to justify your existence

every single day until your body wears down; pin your heart to nowhere,

let it go with the cool wind of home —

it is much easier if you have no heart.

And to enclose within like a treasure

the stories of your pain;

like a walled garden far removed

from morbid interest and pity.